I would like to highlight some of the predictions made at the start of 2018, and how those have panned out, or not actually occurred. I will review some of the predictions and trends from APMdigest's 2018 APM Predictions. Here is Part 2: Start with Looking Back at 2018 APM Predictions - Did They Come True? Part 1
Microtrends
The use of chatbots and other connected assistants have not yielded any benefits in the IT Operations space in 2018, but there are many emerging startups in this area looking to change that over the coming years. While several companies such as ServiceNow and Microsoft made acquisitions in this market, they haven’t produced anything tangible, especially not in 2018. Time will tell if these are a passing fad or they become a cornerstone of computing. IoT is still nascent, especially in the APM market. The predictions about its growing importance and adoption of APM for IoT are still generally immature and early stage. There are some incredible stories for those doing this, but it’s still a very small number today. Those predictions around IoT are likely too early. Similarly, Blockchain doesn’t even go there, way too early considering how few real implementations of Blockchain are implemented in production at this point. Maybe in another five years, we can begin to make some predictions, but it will likely be longer before Blockchain performance management solutions are needed by the market.
Culture and Communication
The biggest barrier to transformation is culture and people. This has been clear from every major CIO survey conducted in the last 10 years of economic growth in this bull market. Our communications and the way we do incident response have evolved significantly. The players in this space are solving an extremely important problem, one which MAY change the culture of an organization. This trend will continue as these technologies become essential to better communication of increasingly distributed workforces. The codification of the role of the SRE by the excellent second book from Google has helped the industry understand how to apply DevOps in an even more concrete manner. The predictions about SRE were spot on, as SRE has become the gold standard for managing and operating applications. Still early for most organizations, but now on the radar. There were several predictions about SRE for the past year. I would, however, say that the vendors who predicted DevOps and culture change by a tool were sadly far from reality. Tools don’t change cultures, but cultural changes often require tool changes. Wrapping up a great 2018, I wish everyone a productive and creative 2019 where we can listen, learn, innovate, share, and advance our group of APM vendors and practitioners. There are many problems to solve, and new approaches being invented daily by this amazing community.